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Hi Captain,

I (any pronouns) have experienced the same deeply uncomfortable restaurant scenario twice, and I’d love advice on handling it or avoiding it in the future. 

I jokingly referred to myself in the subject line as the Dinner Puritan because when I order at a restaurant I order based on dietary restrictions and finances, not exactly pleasure. I’m a single mixed drink or a single entrée with tap water kind of person. I never want to spend money on a main + dessert or multiple drinks unless it is a VERY special occasion. I’m also vegan with multiple food allergies/intolerances, so most menu options are out of the question regardless of price.

I’ve now been in two uncomfortable situations where I went out to eat with a group and ordered one small thing under $20, whereas everyone else ordered apps, drinks, and an entrée, totalling $50+ per person. In both instances a person put a single card down without discussing how they’d divide the check, and I woke up to requests that I pay for my entree plus tip/tax split evenly among the group, as opposed to split proportionally.

With tip/tax split equally I was, respectively, requested over $40 for a single drink, and a single plain order of fries. Aka, they were asking that I pay 140% gratuity! In both cases, I refused to pay this and offered to pay 40% gratuity, which I believe was fair, but deeply awkward as some people had already paid their “share” which was less than what they actually owed. These experiences also leave me feeling deeply wronged by the person who paid. How could they be so careless and cheap? I would never put a person on the spot like that and always do the math proportionally, unless I had consent to do otherwise. 

I told my roommate that going forward I’ll ask the waiter for a separate check, but he said that was also uncomfortable. I also wonder if I’m violating some sort of neurotypical rule that when you go out you are supposed to have “fun” how the entire group is having fun. Am I acting off-putting somehow by just ordering a single drink? I mean, I won’t stop, but I want to know how it’s perceived and how to mitigate the awkwardness of tricky situations like this in the future. 

Thanks!

The Dinner Puritan

Dear Dinner Puritan,

Your plan to tell the server “Hi, I’d like to be on my own check please” at the start of any group dining experience is the least awkward or complicated way to go in my opinion. Everybody at the table who wants to split a group check into equal shares is still free to do that, and any fellow reluctant shared-check people in the group will now have an opening to say, “Me too, please.” In the rare instance that the restaurant has a firm one check per table rule that isn’t already written in bold type on the menu, by asking about separate checks up front you’ll find out right away and can tell your companions now instead of letting it be a surprise later. “It’s fine if the restaurant won’t split the bill, but FYI I’m going to throw in cash to cover what I consume and not do the thing where we all split it evenly.”

With the caveat that reasons are for reasonable people and preferences around optional fun social things with people you like should not require defending, if anyone in the party expresses surprise or dismay and you feel compelled to clarify, try:

• “I have very specific dietary needs and budget constraints. Doing it this way lets me have the pleasure of your company without paying for it later.”
• “I don’t like mixing fun with complicated group math, so this is what works best for me..”
• “Oh, I just prefer it this way.”

I don’t dine out like I used to since COVID and my seven years of experience as waitstaff are a relic of the last century, but here’s what to keep in mind if a fellow diner invokes creating potential hassle for the server as a reason to not split checks:

• Restaurants already know how to split checks and do it all day, every day for other people. It is a routine part of doing business, not some eccentric oddity you invented to be weird at people.
• In my experience working in restaurants, it takes less time and effort to keep stuff separate from the start than have to reconstruct what every single member of a large party ate and drank at at the end.
• If it did make slightly more work to do it your way, so what? Acro$$ tipping culture$ and indu$trie$, there will alway$ be one incredibly $traightforward and univer$ally acceptable way to reward $omeone for going the extra mile for you.

If this makes your roommate or other dining companions uncomfortable, they have several choices open to them:

• If the illusion of group harmony is truly that important to them, they can volunteer to take over paying your portion of the bill for things you didn’t eat or drink from now on.
• They are equally free to avoid group dining situations where you will also be. (If someone would actually do that over something like this, consider that the added expense and effort of appeasing them is even less worth it than it was when you sent your letter.)
• They can feel slightly weird about it inside their private thoughts forever without ever making it your problem again. Which, when you think about it, is kind of what your roommate is asking you to do about his allegiance to splitting things “evenly” except you’re also supposed to pay $40 extra dollars for the privilege.
• They can embrace it as the harmless personal quirk that it is, like so:

Server: “Hi, welcome to The Piehole. Can I get you started with anything to drink, and would you prefer to be on the same check or separate?”

New person at the table who doesn’t know you well: “Oh, I think we’re good with one check!”

Friends who do know you: “The five of us are good on a single check, but Puritan likes their own.” 

You: “I sure do, thanks!”

Server: “Great. What can I get you?”

:no restaurant walls are destroyed by apocalyptic horsepeople as a result and an acceptable time is had by all:

Your job is not to fix everyone’s feelings or reset their expectations about how this should work. Your job is to keep doing what you know works for you. They will adjust, and if they don’t, there are bigger problems in the relationship than how you split the check.

As for whether you are acting “off” or violating some kind of neurotypical social pact: I’m not neurotypical and neurotypicals are not a monolith, but I’ve got some bonus content at Patreon about developing habits of non-compliance in low-stakes social situations.

Dear Captain Awkward,

In 2018, my (she/her, already away from home at the time) father married his current wife. I knew she had a religious conservative upbringing, but my father told me she wasn’t really aware of or interested in most politics. She always acted accepting and compassionate around me.

A few months ago, he casually dropped in a conversation over the phone that she had voted for Trump both times. Specifically, he told me, because she wanted Trump to ban abortion.

This would be horrible enough, but I have disabilities that mean I will probably be severely disabled or even die if I get pregnant and am denied a prompt abortion. My father should know this (I’ve told him). His wife has no excuse of ignorance on the medical reality of the situation – she is a nurse.

I was horrified. At her, but mostly at him for apparently being ok with this, and expecting me to be ok with it too. I had a meltdown (I’m autistic) over the phone. My dad also has a pattern of a) picking his s.o.’s over his kids; b) not accommodating or trying to understand my needs (I once had a panic attack because he invited strangers to a private dinner without telling me where I was able to be polite only by disassociating and running to the bathroom every 5 minutes to desperately try to suck in oxygen. He noticed but didn’t do anything or even check in on me, during or after.); and c) generally being superficially accepting but not demonstrating understanding that his queer, disabled daughter is actually queer and disabled. This felt like part of that pattern. I had no contact with my dad for a couple weeks.

At the time, I was also going through a really rough patch in my professional life, and finally emailed him about how much I wanted to call, wanted my dad, but that I felt like I couldn’t because I can’t trust him. He sent me back a response admitting that he doesn’t understand why I am upset, but he loves me.

Over the next couple weeks, we emailed, and then started texting, with general life updates and light conversation.

Early this morning, while I was deep in despair, I sent him a text asking how he could live with someone who helped all this to happen. (I understand, now that I’ve calmed down, that this was a bad idea.)

My dad responded with a very long text telling me that I should “leave politics out of [his] personal life.” That I was “taking it out on [him]” and “this has been going on for months and [he is] sick of it.” It is stressing both him and his wife out and “by any standard it is unacceptable” and I “need to grow up.”

I responded “Ok. You can contact me by email if you need to” and blocked his number.

And now I don’t know what to do next. I love my dad but if he didn’t feel safe before, he really doesn’t feel safe now.

I need help with how to move forward with a relationship with him. I would still like to email him like I was before, but apparently from his perspective that is “taking it out on him.” I would like to see him for Christmas (in a third location where I can leave if it gets upsetting), but I don’t even know how to raise the suggestion.

Or if I am overreacting, I would really appreciate a reality check. I really really want my dad back.

Thank you,

It’s Not About Her, It’s About How You Are Responding

Dear It’s Not About Her:

I was wondering when the first “How do I do I Faaaaaaamily and Holidays with Trump supporters right now?” email would roll in and it didn’t take long. You were the first over the line (4:28 pm Nov 6, for anyone keeping count) but not the last. I had 13 similar when I started writing this at 11:44 am Nov. 7 and will probably have at least as many more by the time this actually posts. So if it helps to know this, you are far from alone.

Interestingly, I got an editorial note back in the spring about how maybe the “politics” chapter in the book draft was an unnecessary side quest if I wanted the book to be “timeless.” Given that I have been writing about this exact problem from different angles for at least 9 years and counting, and the Nazis didn’t have the good grace to simply evaporate into thin air or stop being related to us, I’m not sure how the problem of “how do you constructively interact with people who say they love you and then vote like they hate you” is an irrelevant artifact of a departed age. FYI, I also saw the questions from this week about “how do we get through another 4 years of this bullshit in one piece” piling up after Tuesday night but today I’m gonna focus on the beat I know well: Family estrangement, boundaries, and how the annual winter holidays and their expectations of forced togetherness, capitalism, patriarchy, and cheer amplify every existing fault line.

Not About Her, you can’t control what your stepmom does or how your dad enables it, you can only control what you do in response. It’s understandably easier to displace your anger at your dad onto his wife than to face the fact that your dad at best doesn’t have a problem with her views and most likely voted the exact same way, if he voted at all. There’s obviously no way to know for sure unless he tells you, but telling you to “grow up” and blaming you for being scared and upset doesn’t fill me with optimism.

Your dad has choices about how he treats you and what kind of relationship he wants with you, and he’s choosing this. Your dad knows how you feel, he has your email to get in touch with you if and when he wants to, and it’s within his power to mend this rift any time he wants to. Not only is he not mending it, he’s telling you outright that he does not share your distress or your priorities, and he’s showing you that he is not a safe (or willing) harbor. This is nothing new. You say he has a pattern of choosing his romantic partners over his kids, and you know that he’s not going to suddenly get a divorce or chew his wife out. Nor is he gonna suddenly be open to celebrating a major holiday in a way that maximally accommodates you.

The fact that you’d rather not take him at his word, that you still hold out hope that a loving dad who can show up for you is still in there somewhere, is a testament to *your* loving and generous spirit, and I truly hope that someday your dad earns even a tenth of the grace you’re extending him now. But a scenario where your dad morphs a safe, comforting person for you to spend time with is probably not happening by Christmas, if ever, so your best course of action is to believe him about his priorities and then do whatever you need to take very good care of yourself.  

That’s why, in your shoes, I’d skip the whole idea of Christmas with your dad this year and make other plans altogether. If you do manage to meet up, my guess is that you are gonna be miserable, dysregulated, and rapid-cycling between fight, flight, fawn, and freeze the entire time, and everyone’s gonna walk away with their worst preconceptions about how it would go pretty much intact. If you stay away this year, think of it as:

1. Giving yourself the gift of time and space to feel your feelings and grieve.
2. Giving yourself permission to do zero work about fostering or maintaining a relationship with your dad for the time being.
3. Taking things one step at a time. Skipping Christmas this year might be the first of many, or it might be a necessary breather. You don’t have to decide all of it right now.

In your shoes, I would probably not think about skipping Christmas as “teaching your dad a lesson,” or anything about influencing his behavior, changing his mind, or fixing his heart. He might miss you and get a glimpse of what his life would be without you, but he might not, and even if he does miss you and feel sad, he might not change a single thing. Please keep your expectations about all of that incredibly low. Time to loop in your actual support system of people who consistently treat you with kindness, plan the most safe, warm, comforting holiday you can for yourself and leave the whole question of your dad alone for now.

Here endeth the individual response and beginneth the general:

The recommendations to choose yourself right now and keep your expectations low go for everyone who wrote me a similar letter and everyone who is contemplating one or has a draft in their Notes app. You can send me a million versions of this question and my advice will not fundamentally change from what it has been all along: Of the available “holiday” and “family” Venn diagrams before you, what’s the configuration that best protects you, your safety, your peace, your integrity, and your precious, irreplaceable, beautiful heart? You know your family, you know your own distress tolerance, so choose your own adventure.

If you don’t feel like celebrating right now, especially if it means doing a ton of labor around planning, hosting, cooking, traveling at great expense to yourself, not to mention gift-giving, and tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of people who demonstrated that they clearly don’t care about you, then this seems like a great year to sit the entire thing out. If certain people would be disappointed, how does that compare to how disappointed you are in them? You might be seeing the words “don’t comply in advance” a lot right now. This whole blog is an exercise in practicing non-compliance with harmful expectations and people in personal and social spheres. What does compliance about this specific thing get you? What does it cost you? In the short-term, where is your line? In the long-term, how bad would it have to get before you made a different decision?

Conversely, if there is a version of celebration that feels good to you, like planning a solo holiday or spending time with affirming friends and family, or because the religious elements hold meaning for you, then do that. If going home for holidays or hosting gives you a sense of joy and normalcy during tough times, then please eke out what joy and comfort you can and deck the fucking halls while you still can. Righteously denying yourself the things you love isn’t going to save a single person that needs saving.

If you want to show up to the usual gathering to be in solidarity with kids and non-terrible relatives or as an act of defiance because you don’t want to cede your whole family and special occasions to the worst people you’re related to for the rest of time, then do that and use the suggestions at the link for how to take good care of yourself. Consider banding together with non-bigots to make bingo cards or put a dollar in a jar every time the bigots say something terrible and donate the proceeds to a cause that they’d hate. “No, keep talking Uncle Paulcifer, every racist or homophobic thing you say is one more dollar for queer sex ed, and I win the Cousins Cup trophy if you get to 100 gross things in a single day!”

If you have the bandwidth and ability to have a bunch of awkward arguments, or to make them endlessly repeat stuff for your own amusement, let fly your inner Buttigieg and loose the dogs of “Well, actually…. ” Or give them the “just asking questions” treatment they love sooooooooo much. “Really? Is that what you think? Interesting. Please explain!” “Can you explain it again, I don’t understand.” “You were just joking? Okay, cool. But why is that funny, though?” “I still don’t understand. Can you explain it to me one more time!” “Hold up, let me get my phone. Could you run through it one more time for the TikTok? I was trying to tell my followers how racist you are, and they didn’t believe me, but I think what you just said will totally seal the deal!” If they leave in exasperation, you get to eat their share of pie! If you get yelled at or dis-invited next year and they don’t, then you’ll have ample time to contemplate how nothing they said or did was objectionable enough to get them sidelined, but your reaction was. (Don’t worry, I’ll set an extra place for you at the Scapegoats Table just in case.)

Look, it’s fun to picture their faces getting soooooooooo red and the way the forehead veins do a little dance when they pop out, but we know that not every theater kid is the “debate kid” brand of theater kid or has the necessary relentlessness or backup squad in place for this kind of shenanigans. If you don’t — especially if you are a vulnerable person whose access to safe housing, food, disability care, childcare, and/or the resources to complete your education requires attendance and a show of nominal compliance while you figure out a long-term plan– I will not judge you for faking it. There are a lot of kinds of courage in the world, and your safety and survival is more important than anyone’s fantasies about how “this” is the thing that will finally “show them.” Especially since nothing anyone does over the course of a single meal or day is gonna change any hearts or minds. (*Please hold that thought, we’ll come back to it in a few paragraphs). 

“But Captain Awkward, I already said I would go/host and everyone’s planning around me.”  Makes sense, I think a lot of us made plans in hopes that this was all going to go a whole different way. Some of you are asking for ‘polite’ ways to cancel, and honestly bless your hearts for giving a shit about maintaining decorum at this moment in time in a way that I frankly cannot match. I can tell you that general hosting etiquette indicates that the sooner you notify people to un-plan around you, the sooner they can make a different plan, and the exact wording you use is less important than delivering clear and actionable information. Meaning, if you text “Sorry, just letting you know that plans have changed and I’m no longer hosting or attending _______ this year. Have a wonderful holiday and hopefully see you in 2025!” today, then you have given everyone enough information to make other plans, and they can draw whatever conclusions they like.

If you cancel, will people demand to know why and badger you to change your mind? Let’s be real: If your family is the kind of family that has you writing to me every year around this time, then you already know the answer to that is “yes, obviously.” There’s no way to prevent them from asking, but you do get to decide how you respond. Remember that reasons are for reasonable people, and the people who are most likely to bug you at length about this are also the ones who most likely know *precisely* why you canceled. Whether you tell them “Still too mad about the election to look at anyone’s face right now!” or repeat “Sorry, plans changed. Maybe next year!” until you give up and mute notifications is up to you.

As long as you follow through on your decision and keep faith with yourself, you are the only person who can make an informed decision about the likely consequences of opting out and whether you’re willing to live with them. For example, if you know that cancelling now–or telling people why–means buying yourself weeks upon weeks of arguments and bullying, I will not judge you if you feign compliance and then suddenly miss your plane, have last-minute car trouble or mysterious plumbing issues, or manifest a fake and highly incapacitating illness that requires 24-7 access to the home bowl. (I figure if we have to deal with a constant threat of illness from unchecked COVID spread or listeria from deregulated food processing facilities, then, oops, I guess we’re also accepting a world where the people who usually do all the labor of making the holidays magical for everyone else might have to call in sick at the last minute.)

*Okay, it’s time for that thought we’ve been holding onto: Do you want to win the argument or do you want to be free?

People who write to me about family estrangement tend to want multiple things at once:

1. They want to finally put a stop to ongoing harm, abuse, and pain.
2. They want freedom to heal from past trauma and de-center the abusive person in their lives.
3. They often want help composing a final kiss-off manifesto that will ensure that the people who harmed them fully understand the harm they caused and why this painful decision was necessary once and for all.
4. They want to both have the last word and lay the groundwork for accountability, a change of heart, or an apology that is never, ever coming. And like, today’s Letter Writer, they hope against hope that it’s possible that there’s a universe where they still get to have a dad.

There is not one thing on that list that is silly or that I don’t deeply empathize with. The “post-election” letters that have rolled in so far this week all have similar sets of conflicting impulses, and and I recognize and salute anything and everything you have personally done to try to fix the hearts, change the minds, or cancel out the votes of the people you’re related to. There is no social script or interpersonal jujitsu you can do in this moment that will make any of this less awkward or painful. Not a one.

Just, political estrangement works like all the other estrangement, and you can’t count on ever getting everything on the list. So do you want to win the argument, or do you want to be free?

You can have space and peace and healing, with time..

You can have the last word, sort of, in that you can say your piece and then stop responding to whatever they say back.

But no matter how hard you try, you can’t fix other people’s hearts for them. These bogus calls for “unity” and “not letting politics distract us from what’s really important” are the same trap they’ve always been: “I get to treat you like shit, and you have to love and forgive me forever no matter how I treat you, and if you ever decide to stop playing this terrible game, I get to play the victim and blame everything on your supposed lack of empathy and commitment. Who wants a hug?”

Le sigh. Patriarchy is nothing if not boringly consistent, and you’ll notice that these articles about “how to coexist peacefully at holidays despite contrasting politics” are always about the concessions and compassion we owe them, and never about the basic human fucking decency they owe us.

Which is why I recommend that whatever you decide to do this year about the problem of “holidays,” “family,” and the precise dread:fury ratio you’re rocking, make it about taking care of yourself and the people who are closest to your heart, not about proving a point or teaching a supposed lesson to people who let you down. If what you need most right now is to tell certain people in your life to eff off into the sun forever and donate whatever you would have spent on their holiday gifts to abortion funds, I hope it feels as freeing as it sounds and brings you the relief and peace you need in this moment. But please, for yourself, let go of the idea that anybody is gonna “learn” anything from it and console yourself with this old quote from the Shakesville days that I think about a lot:

“There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the other person, but because if you don’t speak, they have changed you.”—Mary Quinn, aka Maud.

If quiet quitting The Holidays Industrial Complex feels like self-care or best way to honor your own integrity and peace, you’ll get no arguments from me, this year or any other year. If you want to show up to be in solidarity with others who can’t opt out, or because you want to leave the door open for things to be different someday, or because you’re one of the many people who needs to camouflage for your own safety, I have only love to offer you.

Between the lines of all these questions (current count as of Friday, 11/8/ 1:19 CST = 29) people are asking me for permission to take one course or another, or asking me how to do the most right thing, and I have no moral tests for you because I don’t have to live your life and because there are extremely good reasons that political organizing and mutual aid are *group* activities, reasons that include effectiveness, long-term sustainability, and safety in numbers. In answer to the inevitable “Really? THIS is what you’re worried about? People are dying“ doom chorus, please know that I would never do any of you the injustice of assuming that the precise makeup of your holiday table is even close to your only priority, ethical focus, or vector of possible resistance. All I ask in return is that you take care of you during this holiday season, and don’t make me a liar about the rest of it in the years to come.

Love, solidarity, and non-compliance forever.

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